


something tragic, something pure

by jdphoenix



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Soulmate-Identifying Timers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-18 11:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21560644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Hermione runs into Malfoy in the oddest of all places: a Muggle cafe.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 14
Kudos: 300





	something tragic, something pure

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning that while I'm marking this as complete that's got less to do with a satisfying ending that wraps everything up nicely and more to do with it just ... ending. Think of this as more of a drabble you might find on tumblr. There might be more someday, but for now this is what it is.
> 
> And the reason for that is that I've had this idea for _literal years_ and my muse decided it was finally time to give it a go. After all that time I'm not about to waste it by not posting.
> 
> Title from lovelytheband's "broken"

There’s a beeping from the queue, followed by a squeal of excitement. Hermione—along with most of the cafe’s patrons, of which there are many due to the midday rush—looks up from her lunch to view the scene. A young woman, looking to be about university age or perhaps a bit younger, is dancing on her toes and hugging a young man of similar age so exuberantly he appears in real danger of losing his footing. Green lights shines dimly from each of their left wrists, blinking in time for a full ten seconds before holding on the exact time the two first crossed paths.

Hermione doesn’t roll her eyes precisely, but the rather circular motion of them on their way back down to her book alerts her to another, far more abnormal sight in the Muggle cafe. Just stepping away from the counter, looking so different in a Muggle coat and trousers that she only truly recognizes him by the Slytherin green of his scarf, is Draco Malfoy.

She doesn’t even have time to wonder what the bloody hell he of all people is doing in Muggle London. She has a few extra seconds, due to his having to detour around the new couple, and she’ll need every one of them if she’s to escape with her coat and scarf and, oh bother, _where_ is her purse?

“Granger!”

Damn.

She sinks back onto her seat, dropping her things back onto the chair beside her with little care. What do wrinkles matter when Malfoy is settling into the seat across from her, appearing intent on staying and _socializing_?

He’s scowling, though not at her. His sneer is all for the couple who are now making a hazard in the path of those still queuing, in a hurry to order their lunches before returning to their offices.

“Are all of your lot so fond of public displays of carnality?” he asks while daintily arranging napkin and plastic forks beside the plastic case containing his meal.

“They’re soulmates,” she says curtly. “And what are you _doing_ here?”

“Eating lunch if I can still stomach it. And I don’t care if they’re Romeo and Juliet reborn, they could at least do that outside.”

With some discomfort, Hermione realizes the error in translation happening here. She discreetly pulls her wand and waves it beneath the table so that no matter how anyone at any of the nearby tables tries to eavesdrop, all they’ll hear will be unintelligible muttering.

“I wasn’t being facetious. Muggles believe soulmates are real and can be identified using science. Haven’t you ever wondered why the Department of Muggle Relations strongly suggests all wizards wear those silly bracelets when in Muggle areas?”

Malfoy twists his arm, risking losing a tomato from his sandwich so that he can examine the silver plate that doesn’t sit quite right on his wrist. “That’s what these are for?” He lets out a very judgmental breath of air. “Ridiculous.”

“Obviously.” Though Hermione dreamed, as every little girl did, of meeting her soulmate one day, as she grew older she began to wonder whether the science behind the phenomenon was truly sound or just a very clever bit of marketing to get the whole world invested in an expensive surgical implant. The only reason she even has an implant of her own was as a sort of olive branch to her parents after she restored their memories. Not that it’s done her much good. “But Muggles truly believe in it,” she explains, thinking of her parents and their barely hidden disappointment, “and displays such as this one are not uncommon.”

Malfoy twists for another look—the couple are holding hands while ordering, the young man insisting on paying; Hermione tries to ignore the fact two strangers have just been shackled together for life and focus on how cute their behavior is.

“You really should know all this,” she says when Malfoy returns to his sandwich. Wizards wandering the Muggle world with no idea of basic social norms is a recipe for disaster. “This is why Muggle Studies should be mandatory.”

“And we should all free our house elves as well,” Malfoy says with a tone of wholly unearned long-suffering. “There are a lot of should’s in the world, Granger, you’d best learn to accept them.”

He is just- A million adjectives fly through her brain, most of them quite foul, but she settles on _infuriating_.

In that respect, he hasn’t changed much from their schooldays. In others, however…

He spent a year and a day in Azkaban. By some accounts, a meager punishment for the boy who facilitated Dumbledore’s murder. She hasn’t seen him in person since the day he was convicted and avoided reading articles on the subject of his incarceration, as well as those of his fellow Death Eaters and collaborators. Seeing the trials was plenty for her. So she has no way of knowing if the changes in his appearance are natural results of the wear of time or holdovers from his days in Azkaban. But then perhaps the slight darkening of his hair is a glamour so that he might better pass through Muggle populations and the circles beneath his eyes, making him look somehow paler than ever, are due to nothing but a poor night’s sleep.

“Why are you here?” she asks tartly.

His shoulders are hunched so that he might more easily take an awkward bite off his sandwich. His eyebrows lift as if to suggest the answer is obvious. Once he’s swallowed, he puts paid to that suggestion. “The food’s good.”

“You hate Muggles.” If someone had told her an hour ago that Draco Malfoy would willingly consume food assembled by Muggle hands, she would have laughed in their face and called them the most incompetent liar in the world. Truthfully, seeing it now she still has trouble believing it.

“If you must know,” he says slowly, “they don’t stare.” He sets the sandwich down so that he might begin on his limp salad. “Our lot, as you might expect, don’t much appreciate having a former Death Eater hanging around while they’re trying to eat their food. I’ve been told it puts them off their digestion.”

She takes a moment to absorb that. First the fact he’s lumped her in with him and wizardkind in general despite her heritage, then the slightly more disturbing fact he’s here for precisely the same reason she is.

Even now, years after Voldemort’s defeat, she’s still approached by a stranger at least once a week. Harry, she’s sure, has it the worst, though he doesn’t like to complain. Ron admits he has it the easiest, but he theorizes that’s because he’s a Weasley.

“Likely,” he said just last Christmas when the conversation turned that direction, “most folks rude enough to come on up to me are dumb enough to get it wrong and have gone up to one of my brothers instead, so now they’re too embarrassed to try again.”

Hermione took that information to heart and tried to change her appearance to make herself less identifiable. Hair straightener, big glasses, eschewing all Gryffindor colors, nothing she tried completely eliminated the problem. She’s found it’s easier to simply retreat to the Muggle world whenever feasible.

“Oh,” she says, she must admit rather dully. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d let the feelings of others dictate your actions.” She tries to sound biting and accusatory, but only manages a mild curiosity.

“No, you wouldn’t.” He almost— _almost—_ sounds regretful. “But people change. Especially after an Unforgivable or two is accidentally thrown their way.”

“They wouldn’t!” Horror shocks some life back into Hermione’s voice.

“Not often,” Malfoy admits, “but every once in a while someone with a real ax to grind happens into my favorite restaurants. It’s easier to find new favorites.”

She feels like something of a traitor to her twelve-year-old self, feeling sympathy as she does now. Hell, she feels a traitor to her eighteen-year-old self and sometimes—like right now for instance—the scar Bellatrix left still aches anew. But Malfoy served his time. Whether it was enough is not a subject for the public to decide, but the Wizengamot. That is how justice works and this- this _vigilantism_ is a perversion of it.

“That’s ter-”

“Oh, you have got to be joking.” Malfoy’s sharp exclamation cuts into Hermione’s expression of sympathy. Which is somewhat of a relief, actually, especially when she hears just what’s bothering him. “You’ve got one too! A real one!”

His accusatory stare is directed at her wrist. She’s been itching at her arm and pulled her sleeve down without noticing. She pushes it down again quickly.

“Well, yes. I am a Muggle.”

“You’re a Muggle- _born_ _witch_. You can’t tell me you believe in this Muggle science rot. These people genuinely believe their fiddly machines are damaging the global climate patterns, when everyone knows it was Hogarth Bluestone’s experiments on elementals in the late 1800s that set the creatures off.”

“I know! I just-” She doesn’t know why she feels the need to justify this to Malfoy. Perhaps it’s that he called them “our kind” and there’s some prepubescent part of her that still craves the approval of even the most callous of her peers. Perhaps it’s because of that mark he still wears on his own arm. Perhaps she just needs to justify it to herself and a man she’s unlikely to speak to again is as good a sounding board as any. Whatever the reason, she hears herself confess, “I thought it would make things easier.”

She was twenty-one when she went in for the procedure. Old for it, since most Muggles have it done once they reach their age of majority, but still young enough it didn’t garner much attention. There are plenty of reasons to wait and most of the nurses hurried to reassure her that even if she’d already met her soulmate, it would be fine, the implant was built to account for just that possibility.

Hermione wishes it hadn’t been, that she could have woken to a ticking red timer like so many people do. Instead hers was yellow, displaying the date she first met her soulmate. What should have been a happy revelation was utterly spoiled when her parents recognized the date. How could they not, when the Hogwarts Express always sets off the same day every year?

And of course the damn thing also shows the _time_ she met her soulmate, right down to the second. Thus making it impossible to pretend she might have crossed paths with him in the Muggle sections of King’s Cross Station. Meaning her soulmate must be a wizard and this stupid implant she doesn’t even believe in, meant to bind her more closely to her parents, only marked her as more separate from them than ever.

“Take it from me-” Malfoy snaps the plastic container shut on the remaining half of his sandwich and tucks it behind his scarf, where it disappears completely from view. If any surrounding Muggles notice the spare bit of magic, they give no sign- “if you alter your behavior to accommodate others once, you’ll never stop. Best to face whatever it is you’re trying to avoid.”

He’s standing now and again she’s struck by how strange he looks in Muggle attire. Not bad. Just strange. It’s the sort of thing one would have to get used to seeing on him.

Not that she plans on ever seeing him again after this moment.

“And yet you keep coming here,” she points out. He hasn’t once fiddled with his jacket, so much more restricting than a set of robes. _He_ must be used to the outfit, which means he’s invested some time into this.

One side of his mouth lifts in a wry smile. “I’m a snake, not a lion. We avoid conflict whenever possible. It’s your lot who are supposed to face it head-on.” His chair squeaks against the floor when he pushes it back in. “You’ll never be happy if you don’t.”

She thinks that will be the end of it, but then he surprises her by stopping only two steps away to turn back.

“Thank you, Granger,” he says, oddly sincere, “for letting me sit with you.”

She doesn’t know what to say. Something about his not having asked permission, most likely. But she’s so dumbfounded by his _thanks_ (a thank you from _Draco Malfoy_ , surely this is a sign of the apocalypse; she’ll have to keep an eye out for plagues) that she can only stare as he walks out the door.

Slowly she goes over the whole conversation, simply to convince herself it really did happen. While doing so, her eyes find the newfound soulmates, now happily ensconced at a table in the back. Her heart aches at the sight.

She’d dreamed of finding her soulmate as a little girl. And even when she saw the date on her timer, she had her private hopes. It seemed so obvious who it was.

But that was just more silliness, she thinks as she fiddles with her sleeve cuff. Just as foolish as believing in soulmates at all.

She doesn’t know why she does it precisely. Just because, perhaps. Or maybe, deep down, she knows what she’ll find when she pulls down her sleeve to take a look at the timer’s face.

It’s been yellow from the moment it was installed, waiting for a future meeting with her soulmate to turn it the more pleasant green. More appropriate green, a know-it-all voice in the back of her head crows. Because it’s green now. It was yellow this morning, she knows because she tried to hide from the sun through her curtains and the light on her wrist was worse. And she remembers seeing a flash of it when she reached out to give her change to the cashier no more than half an hour ago now.

She looks to the door as if he might still be there, but he’s long gone, disappeared among the crowds rushing down the busy London streets.

Malfoy.

Her _soulmate_.

It’s a good thing she cast that muffling charm, otherwise she might well be banned from this cafe for the severity of the expletive she lets out.


End file.
